Saturday, October 14, 1944

The Charlotte News

Saturday, October 14, 1944

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the First Army moved deeper into Aachen with continued house-to-house fighting under increasing resistance, but thwarting German attempts during the previous 24 hours at counter-attack. Progress was slow.

It was estimated that 2,000 German defenders remained in the city. A thousand prisoners had been taken thus far in four days of fighting. Eighty-four German tanks had been destroyed during the previous two days. Supreme Allied Headquarters reported only light Allied casualties.

Some 3,000 German civilians had evacuated Aachen and were being provided temporary shelter and food within the American lines.

Modest gains were registered beyond Stolberg and in the Hurtgen Forest area, east and southeast of Aachen. American troops had massed in the Geilenkirchen area, appearing to be preparing for a large assault on the table lands leading to the Rhine.

More than 2,200 American and British heavy bombers struck Cologne and Duisberg. Of these, more than a thousand were RAF bombers which hit Duisberg. Fourteen of the bombers were lost. The equivalent number of American bombers hit, in addition to Cologne, the areas of Saarbrucken and Kaiserslautern.

Fifteenth Air Force bombers flying from Italy hit targets in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and German Silesia.

The largest attack of B-29's to occur thus far took place from China against Okavama on Formosa without loss. Okavama was stated as the most important target of the Japanese Empire south of the home islands. It was a repair facility and supply depot.

It was confirmed by the Associated Press that as many as a thousand planes had participated in the Wednesday and Thursday raids on Formosa, sinking or damaging 63 ships and destroying 396 aircraft.

In China, the Japanese had entered Kweiping, 70 miles from an American air base in southeastern China.

The Russians took Riga, capital of Latvia, releasing two Russian armies to march into East Prussia.

In the south, the Russians were within 31 miles of Budapest.

In Italy, the Fifth Army took some new hills south of Bologna. To the west, the Brazilian troops took Coreglia, five miles northwest of Bagni Di Lucca.

The Greek island of Corfu in the Ionian Sea had been captured by the British. On the mainland, Delvino in southern Albania was invested by Albanian partisans. There was still no confirmation of the report the previous day that the Germans had evacuated Athens and that the Greek flag was flying from the Acropolis.

The White House released a letter drafted by Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle directed to the President, reporting that Thomas Dewey had undertaken a dishonest effort to link the Administration with Communism.

In Hollywood, police were searching for a soldier who had the previous night been annoying a young woman at a dance. The 20-year old woman was found strangled to death in the overflowing bathtub of her apartment. She had been sexually assaulted.

The evidentiary and argument stages of the Andrews murder trial in Salinas, California, had concluded, and the case had been submitted to the jury by the judge at 10:07 a.m. Stay tuned for more informative details.

Not yet reported was the death this date of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, subsequently reported to have been given the choice of taking his own life or submitting to the pre-ordinated result of a trial as a co-conspirator for Hitler's suspicion of his complicity in the July 20 plot to assassinate the Fuehrer. Rommel took the choice of suicide.

On the editorial page, "Hot Tips" offers two tips for readers: 1. Time said that after Germany surrendered, Russia would declare war on Japan; 2. The A. P. reported that the Little Steel formula, freezing wages at 15% above those of January, 1941, would remain in effect until either the end of the European war or until its conclusion was clearly within sight.

"Poor Deal" reports that the War Labor Board's management member had voted against a recommendation for allowing higher wages to textile workers, while the labor member had voted for it, and the public member reported that the average worker in the industry was making insufficient wage to support a standard of living commensurate even with emergency war conditions. The report would now be referred to the Washington Board.

The average weekly wage of the textile worker was $18.13 in 1941, against weekly pay of the auto worker in Detroit of $41.25. There was thus a hopeless disparity in the pay scale, and a likewise hopeless imbalance of trade, between North and South.

"Oversight" tells of Chancellor-designate, Dean Robert B. House of the University of North Carolina having requested of the Advisory Budget Commission, in anticipation of an expanded student body after the war, five new dormitories, a religious center building, a School of Commerce, a language building, a botany building, two wings for the library, an ROTC armory, a drama building, and a physical plant facility.

The editorial, following up on its expressed consternation on October 4 at the $12,000 allotted by the Board of Trustees of the Greater University to enable hiring at Chapel Hill of a new football coach, suggests that this item was left off of the Chancellor's list and should be added, probably right between the new botany building and the new wings of the library.

In any event, Chancellor House got his wish list, even if it took until 1968 to obtain the new library, one bearing his name, next to Wilson Library, and a few more years after that for a rear addition to Wilson. Everything else was accomplished by the mid-fifties, the botany building being constructed in 1963 and the language building, Dey Hall, a year afterward, in 1962. Probably, the hiring of a new football coach delayed the library addition, even if two wings were added in 1952.

The religious center building, across the street from the old cemetery, was constructed, minus one wall, in 1965.

"Tagalongs" comments on the unwanted house guest of each political party during the election cycle. The Democrats had the Communists and the CIO PAC. The Republicans had John L. Lewis of the UMW and some of the defendants in the prolonged Washington sedition trial. Gerald L. K. Smith and Congressman Hamilton Fish were also aboard, along with other unwelcomed isolationists and reactionaries.

Both of the presidential candidates had publicly rebuked these supporters and eschewed their good wishes, even if Governor Bricker had welcomed all comers to the Dewey-Bricker camp.

The editorial offers the lesson of President Wilson in a statement to Jeremiah O'Leary in 1916, offputting, without the least tact or reservation, the support of Mr. O'Leary, head of the Irish-American bloc. Mr. Wilson simply told him the unvarnished truth that he represented many disloyal Americans and that the President wanted none of their support.

The piece asks rhetorically where such candor had gone among modern politicians.

"Is This It?" wonders at the statement of the President, providing that after the war Italy would be free to select the government it wanted. It questioned whether Italy thus would be freed from any of the strictures to be imposed on Germany.

While not opposing self-determination in principle, it questions academically whether, if Italy decided to revert to Fascism, the Allies would be prepared to accept that decision. Would the same mistakes leading to the war be repeated in the face of such an improvident choice?

Dorothy Thompson discusses the tentative plan for the United Nations organization coming out of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Georgetown. She finds it disillusioning to all who had hoped for a strongly representative body. Instead, what was proposed was a strong Security Council, comprised of between three and five permanent members, each with veto power over the use of force to check aggression. That conception left the other 55 nations scheduled to be members of the General Assembly devoid of any real power.

Thus, Ms. Thompson argues, the founding principle of the organization, to insure "sovereign equality of all peace-loving nations", was in fact a lie. She recognizes, however, that there had to be some limit on equality of sovereignty for there to be any workable organization. But as matters stood, the proposed plan provided too much power to the Security Council, making the proposed organization much too top-heavy.

And, the problems which had led to the world wars had involved the larger nations, not the smaller ones. So, the theory on which the proposed plan was based, to streamline the governing of the world to insure the future peace, had as its core premise a fallacy.

Got milk?

Samuel Grafton, still in Los Angeles, opines that one of the reasons for the apathy in the 1944 election, counter-intuitive though that notion is, was that the nation was lonely. For twelve million of its citizens were in the service, leaving nearly equal numbers of women at home lonely and going to movies in pairs.

A second reason he posits was that the liberals were favoring the Government and only so much enthusiasm could be mounted in support of an existing administration.

The agitators were on the other side, voicing vigorously their opposition to the President and the New Deal. Oddly, this agitation was coming from the top of society.

It was all, concludes Mr. Grafton, a strange reversal of roles from the normative.

Marquis Childs, also still in Los Angeles, relates of the suspicion harbored by Western industrialists of those in the East, fearful that when the European war would end, they would get stuck holding the bag on production for the conclusion of the Pacific war, while the manufacturers in the East received a head start on post-war reconversion and thus tending toward monopolization of the civilian marketplace.

The atom bomb would fix that problem.

Other transitional concerns included the displaced war worker population which had expanded California's population by 1.5 million. About 70 percent of those workers planned to remain after the war. In addition, many servicemen who had done their training on California bases wished to return to the Golden State after the war to make it their new home.

Drew Pearson reports of some political appointments to be made in November after the election. Brigadier General Fiorello La Guardia was bound for Italy as the chief U. S. adviser to the Bonomi Government. Leon Henderson would be sent to Germany as the economic coordinator for the occupation.

He next relates that General Marshall and "Assistant President" James Byrnes, War Mobilizer, had gone to Europe to view the front firsthand, to make an assessment of how realistic it was to hope for an end to the European war before the end of 1944. There was being amassed supplies and reinforcements to enable one last strong push before the end of the year and the coming of winter.

Last, he tells of the plight of the servicemen over 35 who were stuck in training camps stateside doing menial tasks and would likely be low on the priority list in being mustered out of the Army during demobilization, as there were no priority points for age. They had been drafted to meet manpower needs stateside and now were stuckees.

Incidentally, Mr. Cavett, the better anagram, utilizing all the letters, albeit with the British spelling, without resort to leftover initials--surely de rigueur at the Yale Fata Morgana Club--, can be discerned here. It may explain why you made the White House Enemies List, though, in our estimate, an estimable achievement that was. The leftover initials, even if missing an "L", were, nevertheless, interesting, at least when combined with the disturbed grave of Scrapfaggot Green's witch in 1944 and film fare of Mr. Heston subsequent to 1970.

We did, by the way, put in an extra "C" yesterday, and claimed it as having been omitted, just for fun, just to test your wits, your rhyme and reason.

Framed Edition
[Return to Links-Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News<i><i><i>--</i></i></i>Framed Edition]
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.